Friday, July 10, 2009

Hey, you're standing in my light!

Embedded in the sidewalk outside the Doty block (aka the Hotel Carver) at 107 S. Fair Oaks, you will find jewels.

You can find variations of these treasures around town. Try Union Street just west of Raymond, where the purple glass is part of a building. Or along the sidewalks of Mission St. in South Pasadena, where the glistening, glass gems are larger.

Here they are in context, in front of the Doty Block:I didn't find a listing on the web for W. D. Perine. However, I think I found his office. 28 New Montgomery Street is a San Francisco address, for what it's worth.

Loren Roberts of Hearken Creative Services has his office in the Doty Block. He learned a lot from his current landlord. "The basement of the building used to extend out to below those glass plugs," he says. "Unsure if they were decorative skylights or what. Then the walls got re-built at the line of the building, so those glass plugs don’t look down to anything except open space. But they started getting plugged with cement when the new walls were getting water damage from the outside, where water would come down through the broken glass..." He also said his landlord has expressed an interest in restoring them.

Several of the major streets in Old Pasadena were widened in 1929 so many of the buildings had their facades whacked off at the time. Some of the buildings kept the original basements extending into the new sidewalks, so the sidewalk lights were a great way to let light filter below.

I've just added Kristin's blog to my blogroll. It's called Do You Like Bubbles? If you click on it and scroll down, you can see a shot of the square version of these glass sidewalk tiles, out in front of POP Champagne & Dessert Bar on Union.

And don't forget, we are people of the dessert, if not people of the champagne, so really you ought to check it out. That block of Union between Fair Oaks and Raymond really ought to be the subject of a PDP photo essay pretty soon.

Eamon, based on the link Loren sent I'm going to say 19th century, but don't limit me to that.

Terry, do you know why 1929? Were streets widened then for paving?

Margaret--Katie is a mosaic fanatic. She finds the best ones wherever she goes.

Altadena Hiker, you've got me on that one. If I lived in a basement, this would certainly be the one I'd want to wake up in every morning. I've never seen these from below. I wonder what the light is really like.